Canadian government shuts 4,500 websites

Emma Woollacott, 30th December 2009

Blame Canada

The Canadian government has suffered something of a sense of humor failure. It has shut down two parody websites criticizing Canada's poor environmental policy - and taken down 4,500 other websites in the process.

The two websites - enviro-canada.ca and ec-gc.ca - carried out an elaborate spoof two weeks ago, aiming to highlight the lack of progress in Copenhagen - and to call out Canada in particular for its 'terrible' climate policy.

The government responded by demanding that the sites' German ISP, Serverloft, remove them. It even went way further, asking Serverloft to try and stop "other environment-related domains" originating from its servers

And, astoundingly, Serverloft responded by turning off an entire block of IP addresses, thereby knocking out more than 4,500 sites that had nothing whatsoever to do with the hoax.

"We are sorry to see that the Canadian government will not take certain actions that could help stave off catastrophic climate change," said Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men, one of the groups that performed the hoax.